Tag Archives: Austra

Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Friday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:

Chris: Ariel Levy’s New Yorker article about the many trials and depredations of Silvio Berlusconi is unsurprisingly filled with great quotes, from the crony who approvingly equates his Presidente with Mussolini to the former cabinet minister who explains: “His lies are like the lies of a baby: he gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar and says ‘I’ve never eaten a cookie in my life!’” Levy meets Italians who delight in their buffoon of a leader and ones who cringe at being represented by a human stereotype, but she zeroes in on the oligarchic control that allowed Berlusconi to make his own appalling sexism omnipresent in the media: “If your only information about female people came from Berlusconi’s channels, you would likely conclude that they exist specifically to be sexually humiliated in public.”

Margaux: I love Peter Galison and his concrete ways . He wrote a book about how it was probably pretty relevant that Einstein had a crappy job at the patent office where he had to think about how to synchronize clocks for train schedules – a very big problem at that time. It’s an obvious idea once you think about – the obviousness a natural sign for a real genius idea. It feels better to think that something as abstract as the theory of relativity could originate from a problem in the world so newly created as “how to coordinate train schedules”. One’s mundane job feels better too. This New York Times article surveys his incredibly varied works.

Speaking of grounding the symbolic realms, this reminds me of how, reportedly, Buckminster Fuller had a pretty hard timeas a child understanding that the dots on the blackboard represented points in the world – and lines drawn between them represented connections. And how he tried to change the phrase “worldwide” with the more grounded “world around” but didn’t have any luck.

Which makes me think of how strangely grounded the artist Rebecca Belmore‘s repetitive gestures are. Sometimes, when people are trying to be more direct with their art, they occasionally think to take their work off the canvas or pedastal or loom. Sometimes the results of this freedom can, unfortunately, become even more trapped by the medium of the gallery – as it can be a challenge for irregular forms or complicated messages to keep their shape outside this context. But the artist Rebecca Belmore always succeeds to escape both the mediums, the gallery boxes and the confusion.

If you’re not familiar with Rebecca Belmore’s work, Daniel Baird’s article in Walrus Magazine is a good survey of her work. Even if you haven’t seen Belmore’s work, it is hard not to be horribly moved by even Baird’s simple descriptions of her most famous performance pieces. The works are made up of ideas and gestures and performance. They performances’ power are just as undiminished through video or account (though Daniel Baird is to be credited too here). Rebecca Belmore’s repetitive gestures seem to be the gestures that she knows are missing in world – gestures of grieving or acceptance or making things right or simply known. Her gestures became part of the concrete world through sheer force of will, repetition and need. Though unconventional, the work communicates directly to anyone who can look.

Carl: The best thing I’ve read about class in a long while is Polly Toynbee’s spare-no-fistpower column on the British equivalent of the (less commonly thrown around) North American “white trash” slur, “chav,” the most successfully bruited-about socioeconomic bogeyman since the 1980s-90s welfare-mom/crack-mom in the U.S. The spectre of the chav, she writes, is a tool in “the conspiracy to deny the very existence of a working class, even to itself.”

Killer bars: That brief period between 1917 and 1979, when British wealth, trembling in fear of revolution, ceded some power, opportunity and money to the working classes is over. There is now no politics to express or admit the enormity of what has happened since the 1980s – how wealth and human respect drained from the bottom to enrich and glorify the top.

She was inspired by what seems like a fantastic new book on the subject, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, by Owen Jones. Put it on your summer reading list. The whole thing reminds me of a joke I heard this week somewhere I can’t recall: A corporate executive, a union member and a Tea Party member are sitting at a table. On the table are 10 cookies. The CEO reaches out and takes nine cookies at once and then turns to the Tea Party member and says, “Look out! That union guy is trying to take your cookie!”

Nobody in the past 30-plus years has sung about such subjects better than the late, great Gil Scott-Heron, and nobody has sung in prose about the death of GSH (or many other topics this year) than the great Greg Tate this week in the Village Voice. A truly heartbreaking eulogy. A few killer bars among many:

George Clinton once said Sly Stone’s interviews were better than most cats’ albums; Gil clearing his throat coughed up more gravitas than many gruff MCs’ tuffest 16 bars. Being a bona fide griot and Orisha-ascendant will do that; being a truth-teller, soothsayer, word-magician, and acerbic musical op-ed columnist will do that. Gil is who and what Rakim was really talking about when he rhymed, “This is a lifetime mission: vision a prison.” Shouldering the task of carrying Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson and The Black Arts Movement’s legacies into the 1970s world of African-American popular song will do that too. The Revolution came and went so fast on April 4, 1968, that even most Black people missed it. (Over 100 American cities up in flames the night after King’s murder—what else do you think that was? The Day After The Revolution has been everything that’s shaped America’s racial profile ever since, from COINTELPRO to Soul Train, crack to krunk, bling to Barack.)

This recollection of being taught creative writing by Scott-Heron early in his career is also well worth reading.

Finally, as a little ray of sunshine through that beautifully rippled gloom – hey, it’s really nice outside! – here’s a video that seemed to me this week as if it was everywhere on the social networks, but in fact it was only everywhere on my social networks, because where 80s anarcho-collectivist-folk-punk and Torontopian twang-rock intersect you apparently automatically find all my contact information. It’s a joyful shambles of a hootenanny by the Mekons and Toronto’s own Sadies on one of my favourite songs, “Memphis, Egypt,” from one of my absolute favourite albums, Rock N Roll (1989). Apropos of the above: “We know the devil and we have shaken him by the hand/ embraced him and thought his foul breath was fine perfume…. Just like rock ‘n’ roll.” It is sung in Zurich, where the proverbial fiscal gnomes reside.

I was planning to write a real post this week, I swear. Then one of the people I wanted to interview for it came down with a nasty flu. Instead, like Carl last time round, I’m going to share a B2TW-friendly piece from parts elsewhere – my Toronto Standardinterview with Katie Stelmanis. Here’s the intro:

“Many theological, mythological and esoteric traditions suggest that knowing an individual’s true name gives one power over them.

But the ancients never had to agonize over band names. Toronto’s Katie Stelmanis switched her stage moniker to Austra last year, and if that handle is less enigmatic than it seems — it’s just her middle name — the change corresponds with a greater musical one. The distorted keyboards and MIDI effects of her 2008 solo debut Join Us have given way to dark, atmospheric electro-pop on Austra’s upcoming Feel It Break, lushly produced and pledged to rhythm. […]“

The final result was a little more formal than I might prefer, but that’s magazines for you, and most of them wouldn’t couple the Q&A with 22 minutes of Austra performing inside an artificial cave. Yes, I’m excited about this Toronto Standard business. Carl will be writing for it too. In the meantime, I leave you with a bonus question, ’cause blogs don’t have no word count:

CR: I know it’s not included on the album, but what drew you to cover that Roy Orbison song, “Crying”?

KS: That song…Whenever I choose cover songs, I always choose songs that are really fun for me to sing. And I think, also, songs that are different from the songs that I write. That song is 100% about the words, and about the melody, and the words are just as strong as the melody. I often don’t listen to words when I listen to music, but in that song they’re so potent and so strong that it’s really enjoyable for me to sing. I feel like I’m telling a story, and it’s…it’s a really emotional and beautiful song, and I always take pleasure in singing songs that are telling a story, because my songs don’t really do that.